Safari Day 2 & 3 - The Masai Mara

Day 2 Eight hours "in the saddle" today and I feel sorry for my Driver Maurice. It's a long day and all I had to do was stick my head out the hole in roof of the minivan. Poor Maurice had to negotiate the maze of dirt tracks that crisscross the planes of the park.

There was plenty of highlights though. In the morning, we saw a couple of lions mating. while we (and about 7 other minivans) were intruding on the lion's intimate moment (they didn't seem to mind too much), Maurice spotted another male coming down the hill. The third lion headed for the other two, paying little attention to the wall of Toyotas

that lay in his path. I thought that he might be looking for trouble, but the third lion at least seemed to respect the privacy of the first two, and disappeared into the long grass with disturbing ease.

We then headed further into the park to catch up with the main migratory herds of wildebeest and zebra. There was thousands of the buggers - hundreds of thousands. The hills were covered in thousands of dark specks, like those little chocolate sprinkles on a cupcake. They reckon there are about one million wildebeest that make the annual treck to the Masai Mara from the southern Serengetti, next door in Tanzania.

The herds were mostly grazing around the Mara River. If you've ever seen any docos on the migration, then the Mara River is the one you see the wildebeests trying to cross while being chomped on by giant crocs. However, this year was a "bad migration" according to my driver, since the rains were small and the river low, meaning the crossing was easy, and there wasn't much chomping. Bad for the tour groups but good for the wildebeest, I suspect!

Anyway, on the Mara River, we saw herds of hippo. It was the middle of the day so they weren't up to much, which is probably just as well since they have a reputation of being pretty grumpy creatures.

A park ranger took me along the river bank to see some crocs sunning themselves. I got a little nervous when there ws a rustle in the bushes nearby that made the brids take flight. The nerves weren't helped by the fact that the ranger slipped the safety off his kalashnikov and continued glancing about - despite assuring me that it was only a worthog. Needless to say, I made it out alive to see the largest croc I've ever laid eyes on. The ranger had dubbed him Solomon and reckoned he was 90-95 years old. All I reckoned, was that he must have eaten plenty of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle in his life because he was HUGE!

We had lunch by the mara river, gladly far enough away from the water to not be worried about crocs or hippo. We were however, pestered by a family of small monkeys who liked the look of the fruit in our lunch boxes. A small branch occasionally waved in their direction was enough to keep them at bay. After lunch we started making our way back across the park towards our camp. Of course, that included stopping off to see the poor harassed cheaters who I'm sure are starting to get hungry by now.

On the way back to camp, we stopped off at a "traditional" Masai village. I use the inverted commas because it felt a little like a theme park. The villagers performed a couple of dances. These are the jumping guys you may have seen on Tele. I had a go and had to work hard to jump as high as the "chief" who was a good head shorter than me. Then it was into one of the huts to check out the living conditions - dark and gloomy - and to have the dietary habits explained. The Masai diet consists of meat, milk and cows blood. It didn't sound too appetizing, and I was glad they hadn't put on a "feast" for me. After that it was the obligatory trip to the village market so they could peddle some souvenirs.

Day 3

It's up for an early morning game drive before heading back to Nairobi. It was a pretty successful trip as we saw 6 lions this morning. The first two were a couple of males strolling around looking for a feed. While we were watching them, the driver spotted a couple of more males wandering along the other side of the valley so we zoomed over for a look before

the rest of the minibus herd arrived. They seemed to have the minivans worked out. One of the pair hung bacK, lay down and seemed to sulk for about 5 minutes while the other one strode ahead and away from the vans.

The sulking lion eventually got up and went looking for his mate. This involved a few impressive roars and a fair bit of looking across the valley - it seems lions even have trouble spotting each other in the long grass! As it turned out, these two males were heading back to the male and female we had seen mating the day before. In the end the four ions just lay down amongst a scrum of the beep beep, click and whir of 15 to 20 minivans, patiently waiting for the tourists to lose interest so they could get on with the job of finding their next meal.

(The link to the pics are in my last post)

We headed off back to camp, but not before stopping off one more time to annoy the cheater family - just for old times sake.

The trip back to nairobi was pretty uneventful after the excitement of the last few days. We have a few more days here until Shez has finished presenting her training, then it's back to the Middle East on Friday.